[gopalv]

PHP is fast - I've been there, made ~4k RPS websites in PHP & memcache.

There's one big, primary reason for it.

PHP is dumb.

You can't do clever things in PHP with the language, you have to all the clever things in how you design with it.

You can't overload functions or redeclare them later.

You can pretty much resolve a function at call-time, without worrying about decorators around it or about any meta-programming.

This makes for a fast VM in PHP, because it can make assumptions about function call-order much more than something like python.